Promise I'll Breathe Soon
by TunelessLyric
Summary: It's Kaidan Appreciation Week 2016. Day four theme: loss. After Shepard died to end the Reaper war, Kaidan was left alone again, trying to put himself back together. Again. This time he is going to deal with loss better. He is going to be okay - even though she isn't coming back - because that's what she would expect.


_Also posted to my Tumblr account, this was written for day four of Kaidan Appreciation Week. Today's theme is Loss, which I really enjoy writing because it's so complicated. Anyway, hoping to get some more fluffy and feel-good stuff for the next three days of KAW._

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 **Promise I'll Breathe Soon**

" _Nothing matters ever since the day_

 _You pulled the pin on my heart like a hand grenade" –_ SIXX AM 'Stars'

It's a sunny day, the kind Shepard always loved. There's enough of a breeze to keep the air moving, but not too much. The warmth from the sun lands on bare skin and plays over it like a soft caress. The wind lifts the edges of smart skirts and carefully ironed dress pants. It touches the flower petals and pushes their fragrance through the crowd.

There was no body. Nothing recoverable. One second, Commander Shepard stood for humanity and the entire cycle and the next… she was a thin ash on the wind. So this isn't a funeral, an interment or anything like that. This is simply a gathering with a few speeches and a basket full of wadded up, damp tissues. There are food tables, but most of the offerings have barely been picked at.

Rows of grateful and grieving sit in folding chairs on the lawn. The survivors. The friends. Whatever she had left at the end, they are here now. And the podium. It stands like a monument to everything lost in the war with the Reapers. It waits for some brave soul to march up and stumble through a speech.

A man, sitting with his head bowed, clutches a wrinkled and creased sheet of paper. Actual paper. With real ink inscribing real words. He wipes at his dark eyes and sighs.

"Kaidan, if you don't –" says the turian seated at the man's elbow.

"Garrus, I-I'm doing this." Kaidan glances at the turian. His voice is rough and low.

Garrus's mandibles quiver in assent and he squeezes the human's shoulder before turning his attention to the silently weeping quarian on his other side.

With a deep breath, Kaidan gets to his feet and begins his long journey to the podium. He limps, still not fully recovered from the blast that took him out of the fighting right at the end. The pain with every step is a reminder he doesn't want to lose. It tells of the tender look Shepard threw over her shoulder as she walked away from him the final time. It tells of their last kiss and her promise to come back. The promise she didn't keep.

One hand smooths the paper against the glass surface of the podium. One hand curls into a tight fist at his side. Kaidan licks his lips and leans forward. "Shepard." He tries to swallow, can't. He clears his throat and tries again, speaking through the tears trying to get out. "You know, I – uh – this doesn't get easier the second time around."

A few tearful chuckles rise from the audience. In the front, Garrus takes Tali's hand and they cling to one another. Kaidan's heart twists at the sight.

"Commander Shepard was a leader. She was an inspiration. She was, as any of her crew could tell you, a friend." Once the words make it to Kaidan's tongue, they seem easier to get out. He glances down to his page and releases his fist. "A remarkable woman, she came from a farming colony on Mindoir. From the time she was sixteen, her life was a headlong run. The batarians hit her homeworld hard. Rather than let that stop her, she enlisted in the Alliance.

"On Akuze, Shepard was the only survivor of a fifty-marine unit. This," he grips the edge of the podium tightly, "was her first encounter with Cerberus.

"You all know Shepard was the first human Spectre. You all know what she sacrificed to hunt down and destroy Saren Arterius. You all know that, three years ago, we gathered to celebrate her life and mourn her. But Cerberus had found her, rebuilt her, and stolen her from a long-deserved rest."

And this is the part of the speech that Kaidan had written and rewritten over and over. What could he possibly say about Commander Alyx Shepard? How could he sum up that incredible life with a few words?

"For anyone who wasn't part of her crew," he seeks out Joker and EDI as he speaks, "it may be a surprise to see me standing here and giving this eulogy. I'm not a superior officer. I'm just another Spectre. I wasn't a part of her crew to stop the Collectors." Kaidan lets out a sharp bark of laughter. "Hell, we didn't even have a civilized conversation after she came back from the dead."

Another titter of chuckles from the crowd. Liara offers a small smile of encouragement.

"But here's the thing. Despite that, Shepard was always around to keep me sane. She never hesitated to look in on me, or any of us, when we needed a listening ear or a sympathetic pat. The fate of the whole galaxy was on her and she made time to visit after every mission. When ops didn't go right, when we lost, she didn't expect us to do anything for her.

"After facing Saren and the Reapers, after losing her twice, I'm not scared to admit this anymore." But Kaidan still sucks a breath in through his nose before he can go on. "I loved her. With everything I had. And when she left me standing there in London, watching her walk away, part of me died with her. I thought I had felt the worst before. I thought I knew what it was to lose someone for good. Some part of me must have known she was still alive because…"

He can't say anything, his mouth works and nothing will come out. Kaidan stands there in front of all those people and buries his face in his hands. He can't control the sobbing. It's so silent. No one moves the entire time he tries to get a hold of himself.

Eyes streaming and chest aching, he finally looks up and sets his jaw. He is going to get through this. Squaring his shoulders, he says, "Because that was nothing compared to this. Shepard was an amazing woman and had so much love to give. I didn't deserve the second chance I was given with her, but she gave it.

"I miss her."

All things considered, it is a _shitty_ eulogy. The word – they aren't enough. The breakdown in the middle – it looks like a grab for sympathy. Shaking his head, Kaidan limps back to his seat.

The service chugs along. Hackett gets up and says his bit. There's some old tradition of laying a wreath. Time goes on.

"Kaidan." Tali puts a gentle hand on his knee.

He looks up.

"It's time to go."

It's easy for her to stand and force a smile behind her faceplate when Garrus puts an arm around her shoulders. She hadn't lost her anchor to sanity, to the ground beneath her feet. She had someone to hold her when the loss slammed into her like an asteroid and it was all she could do to pull in another shaky breath. There was someone waiting for her in the kitchen with breakfast waiting whenever she managed to crawl out of bed.

When the silence grows from awkward to downright painful the turian draws his girlfriend away gently. He makes a sympathetic noise in farewell before they lose themselves in the crowd.

Kaidan feels a hand settle on his arm. He turns slowly to look into the concerned eyes of Liara.

"I feel very alone now that I am no longer surrounded by the _Normandy_ 's crew," she says. "Do you mind coming back to my apartment for a few days?"

Weak warmth spreads through him. The way she makes it sound like he would be the one helping her is sweet. He nods. "A few days," he agrees softly.

Liara smiles, relief bringing a healthier blue tinge to her face. For a moment, he gets a glimpse of the young scientist he first met on Therum. She stands and offers a hand to help Kaidan up. As he takes it and straightens, he is reminded of the day on Earth when Shepard left him and Liara behind the final time. The day she left him clinging to the asari, the three of them barely able to stand from exhaustion and the twisted wreck of a Mako falling on them.

"Kaidan, Shepard left you behind because she wanted to know you would be safe," says Liara, as if she knows were his thoughts wandered.

"Who gets to choose who gets left behind?" he asks, stumbling along beside her.

They walk wordlessly to her shuttle and he stops expecting a reply. After they takeoff, however, she leans forward and sighs. "If you had put her on the ship and told her to watch you walk to the beam, if you had asked her to let you risk your life in her place, would she have stayed?"

He shook his head, feeling like a schoolchild being reprimanded.

"And if you had offered to go with her, would she have let you?"

He shook his head again, throat too tight to speak.

Liara looked away. "Shepard didn't want to leave you. She had to do her duty to protect the galaxy, this cycle of sentient beings. I think she knew if she wasn't the person to step up, no one could have taken over for her. She gave her life so you wouldn't have to."

It didn't help a lot, but a tiny bit of the ache eased. Kaidan remembers being stuck in a drunken stupor for weeks after Shepard died the first time and, even though he had learned to cope with the pain that way, he doesn't want to go through that again. So he goes back to Liara's apartment. He wakes up in her spare room fifteen times before he starts feeling alive again. A full month after the service, he starts making breakfast for the asari. He moves his belongings from the lonely little place on the Wards to the tidy apartment on the Presidium.

Liara still runs her Shadow Brokering from the office down the hall, but Kaidan is left out of it. Having her around begins to make him feel closer to normal. They start laughing together, though the first time Kaidan chuckles he feels a stab of guilt for laughing when the woman he wanted to spend his life with is dead. But then Liara's face falls and he knows he slipped and made things hard on her again.

In time, the pain fades enough that he can get through the day without being knocked sideways by the realization that Shepard isn't coming back this time. He can't find it in himself to rejoin the Alliance or to continue as a Spectre, but he gets on with C-Sec for a few months.

Then, two years after he moved into Liara's apartment, over supper he says, "I'm going to Earth."

The asari hesitates before she nods and smiles encouragingly. "Of course," she says easily, like she doesn't know this is the last time she'll see him.

Without Shepard, everything happened the way it did before. Being around the crew, his friends, was too hard. She was the only thing that kept them together. The squad drifted like ships without anchors. Kaidan honestly couldn't name the date when he had last heard from Garrus or Tali. Wrex hadn't even bothered to contact anyone after the war ended. Jack sent an email eight months ago, but nothing since. None of Shepard's other friends had been _friendly_ with Kaidan to keep in touch.

But Kaidan has been away from his home for too long. He longs to walk through his family's orchards – what survived Reaper occupation anyway – again.

Liara helps him transport his things to the spaceport. They stand together until passengers are called to board.

"If you ever need a vacation," he says, but she won't actually leave the Citadel.

"I'll send you a message beforehand," she promises, though they both know she never will send a message.

He wraps his arms around her. They hold each other up until the final boarding call echoes through the spaceport. Then he lets his arms drop. "Take care," he says. It isn't enough to express how grateful he is for putting up with him for the past two years, but he can't put that into words.

"You too, Kaidan."

As he leaves Liara in the waiting area, he suddenly understands Shepard's sacrifice. She had known he would live without her. She had trusted him to find a way to carry on. He had before. But to her, one day she had passed out from oxygen deprivation and the next she had woken up two years later. She had never spent any time without him before. After their falling out on Horizon, and he had apologized, she had kept him updated on her travels. He had told her how much he loved her on a weekly basis, if not more often. When she had gone through the Omega-four relay, she hadn't expected to come back. He had gone through the motions of daily life, waiting and hoping against hope that she could cheat fate again. And she had. She had spent so long saving him that it hadn't been a question of sacrificing herself to end the war. It had always been a foregone conclusion for her.

He finds his seat and settles in for the trip, realizing something. For the first time, he is thinking of Shepard and smiling.


End file.
